Even Vampires Get the Blues
by the.goal.is.greatness
Summary: You are time. Foul time that steals the gold from the maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from the child's eyes. Dark time that has stolen from everything there ever was all the time that it held precious and divine... And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave... [Eric-centric] [drabble]


**Title:** Even Vampire Get the Blues  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Rating:** T  
**Pairing:** Eric-centric  
**Spoilers:** N/A  
**Summary:** You are time. Foul time that steals the gold from the maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from the child's eyes. Dark time that stolen from everything there ever was all the time that it held precious and divine… And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave…  
**Word Count:** 1,192  
**Warnings:** Drabble

**Disclaimer:**_ Southern Vampire Mysteries / True Blood_ belongs to Charlaine Harris. Summary belongs to Neil Gaiman

**A/N:** Thoughts on immortality.

* * *

When he had been alive, time had seemed to pass in the blink of an eye – so quickly that each season was always a wonder that it had come so soon. Another winter, another spring, another season, another year gone by. Life was hurtling forwards at an impossible pace and all he wished was for it to slow, so he could be a boy, carefree and wild, for longer.

He wants to run through the fields and forests, strong and tall and handsome – feeling the eyes of the maidens on him. He wants to hunt with his brothers and boast that when they are men they will be the fiercest warriors the clan has ever seen. He wants to train with his longsword with his father, sleep beneath the stars with his dogs, sail across the river in his ship. He wants to _live._

* * *

And then he is a man and married and his wife is strong and beautiful and he imagines all the sons she will bear him. How he will teach them like his father taught him. And he wants time to move faster forward so he can hold his child in his arms, because he cannot imagine that time would be unkind to him. He is Eric Northman, a Viking proud and strong. What could time ever do to him except advance?

His wife bears him two sons and they are perfect and she is strong, so when she is with child he cannot help but think it will be another boy, cannot help but _know_ how kind this life is being to him. But then his wife bears him a daughter and his wife won't stop bleeding and there is nothing the midwife can do to halt the endless flow of life blood and he watches as the light fades from her eyes and suddenly he thinks only of all the time they won't have together.

But he has two strong sons and a daughter.

And time is a fickle mistress.

One son falls in a raid, too young to hold a sword, but still doing his duty as their home is attacked. His younger boy grows and grows and when Eric is in his mid-twenties, his son is ten and almost a man so he takes the boy raiding and all he gets for that is his son massacred on an enemy beach.

* * *

And then time comes to him in the shape of a man who is not human and though Eric has generations of his ancestors screaming inside his head that this man is a demon, the man also promises Eric that he will never have to face the ravages of time, never have to submit to its will, can be young and strong and handsome forever.

How can he refuse?

At first, it is brilliant – he is strong, so strong. So what that he only ventures out at night? His raiding parties have never been more successful. He vanquishes his enemies like they are flies. He is unstoppable. Time is nothing to him, days are repetitive, endless, what cares he for they?

Until the day he realizes his father is old and frail and gray and Eric is still a young man. Until the say his daughter has children and then grandchildren of her own, and her eyes grow vacant with cataracts and she dies. Until his great-grandchildren have great-grandchildren and Eric is still the same. There are cities appearing every day, new weapons and war tactics and Eric is still a Viking with a sword avenging his fallen children and brothers. His empire falls and the buildings crumble into dust. The herds vanish, the forests are razed, new cities are built with machines and steel and technology.

The new world beckons.

* * *

For hundreds of years, he and his kind live in the shadows and he builds a little pocket empire out of the prying eyes of mortals and their too short lives and their aging and their dying. But soon, soon, soon, comes the day when the world knows what they are, quakes and shivers in fear over the creatures of their nightmares living among them. And it is a different kind of living then, to be _sought out_ by humans, to want to be seen, to want to be known. He reveals in it, forgets, for a time, the history of having a wife and child.

Until a telepathic walks into his life and the past comes screaming back.

Sookie is unlike the other women he has known, it draws out the secret inner yearning in him that would have lived and died one thousand years ago. The part of him that imagines what his life would have been had his wife and children never died, the part of him thought would have relished life and chose to live and die with them, and never would have accepted the bargain of a stranger on a dark beach. He had thought that part of him was as dead as his mortality. But, like so many other things, time proves him wrong.

With this girl he imagines it. Imagines turning her, and living with her until the very earth collapses around them. He imagines, sometimes, in the height of the day when he is deeply asleep, being mortal again, and living with her until death tears them apart.

But she chooses another, a dog, and then the cycle starts all over again. He watches her have children and grandchildren. He watches them age. Watches as, one by one, they die and die and die. And soon, always too soon, there is no one left that remembers him, he has faded into the background with the same undead, the same politics, the same endless night.

* * *

But time is a capricious master, she gives and she takes away, she beckons with equal parts nostalgia for the past and curiosity for the future. Again the cycle, again the wheel turning: buildings falling, only to be replaced by newer, bigger, better, more. Cities that float in the clouds. Civilizations and empires blossom and rise in the void of space, far from the sun. New worlds to discover and conquer and own. A paradise for an undead warrior.

In time, frivolous, unfaithful, dreadful time, he will find his place – a place that makes him remember fondly the children he had millennia and millennia ago, that make him recall a girl with the scent of fairies on her skin, that cause him to suddenly yearn for a broadsword and a long ship and that make him think of home.


End file.
